1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related generally to a data processing system and in particular to a method and apparatus for the migration of a software partition. More particularly, the present invention is directed to a computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable program code for obtaining the absolute path name of an open file system object from its file descriptor for utilization in migrating a software partition in a software partitioned environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a software partitioned environment, a single instance of the operating system can be partitioned into multiple virtual operating system environments. Each of these virtual operating system environments is known as a software partition. A software partition is a virtualized operating system environment within a single instance of the operating system. An example of a software partition is AIX® workload partition (WPAR), which is a product available from International Business Machines (IBM®) Corporation.
Software running within each software partition will appear to have its own separate instance of the operating system. A software partition may include one or more processes. Processes in a software partition are completely isolated from processes in other software partitions in the same system. They are not allowed to interact with processes in other software partitions in the same system.
A software partition, including any processes running in the partition, may be migrated from one physical computing device to another physical computing device, while still active. Migration of a software partition involves checkpointing the state of every process in the partition on one data processing system and then restoring the state of every process on another data processing system using the checkpoint data.